Yeah, another bloody mouthful of a post title. Maybe the worst yet. Still, there’s a lot of crossover with the content of this post.
Firstly, the models themselves. They’re 7 of the 8 models from the two old-school WarZone blisters, TG9505PB: Warzone Dark Legion Undead Legionnaires and TG9511PB: Warzone Dark Legion Undead Legionnaires. Clicking those links will take you to Prince August’s site where both are still available from original stock after all these years. Pretty good sci-fi zombies, to be quite honest. Old-school WarZone collectors often get in contact with me and ask if I have anything to sell so I like to point out when the figures on show are still available where possible. (If I ever do sell any, I’ll post them up here – I promise!)
The missing eighth of the models was actually painted a few years ago. Now, I haven’t played WarZone for many, many years at this point – but some of the models were real crackers (some were awful as well, no argument there!) These sci-fi zombies with guns were always pretty cool looking, but I never really had much of a use for them. Still, I did a bunch of Blessed Legionnaires when I gave the Nurgle Cult army a first-go-round back in 2015 or so. Need to rebase that Spawn of Demnogonis as well onto a proper 32mm base.
Obviously, this lot fits in with my own monthly challenge – that of Unit-Ed October. Because it’s a unit of models. A unit of 7 in fact – Nurgle’s (un)holy number! Coincidence, yes – but a fitting one. Paint scheme-wise, I painted 6 of them in the same Auscam as the main elements of my Imperial Guard force – the 11th Terror Australis Regiment. The 7th has his carapace armour painted in greys in a nod to his Warzone Bauhaus roots.
And finally, I found out via Rantingsfromunder’s blog that there’s a thing called Zom’tober in the minis blogging community – though it’s one of those Blgospot ones, and we know that WordPress and Blogspot are a pain in the arse when it comes to getting on with one another. Unfortunately, it seems that Zom’tober has some pretty specific rules about completion that rule me out participating …pretty much ever.
To take part you just need to paint one Zombie or Survivor (or more!) each week, in any scale you like, posting it to your blog by that week’s Sunday (we use Sunday’s as the end of each Zomtober week). So that means posting one or more newly painted Zombie or Survivor minis each week on or before the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th this year.
Doesn’t really work for me. I finished 4 of these suckers at once 2 weekends ago, and then the final three last weekend – with the blood effects across all of them applied yesterday evening in two sittings. I mean, they’re zombies! Are there any other figures that lend themselves so well to batch painting?
So while they don’t exactly fit into the Nurgle Daemons army, I’m sure that nobody reasonable would complain about a bunch of poxwalkers thrown in there as well. I’ll have to figure out where I’ve stashed the Blessed Legionnaires and that other zombie and pool the lot of them together for the next time I do an “army in progress” type shot for the Nurglites.
Oh. And after taking the above photos, I found the 8th model. While he’s fully painted, he does need a bit of touch-up to get him to the point where he’ll nicely fit in with the rest of his cohort here. I might attempt to get him done before the month ends, so I can bump my monthly total up that little bit more towards the 31 I want to have done…
Edit – Got that last one touched up, retook three of the photos tonight (following night to original post) and replaced the original pics of three with the four.
Those are ace, the faces are nicely expressive. You don’t often see zombies carrying guns and looking like they know how to use them but I like the effect. I also like the way that from certain angles they almost look like normal soldiers, it adds to the punch when they turn round and turn out to be zombies!
You’re right, that Zom’tober thing sounds way over complicated, far too many hoops to jump through for my taste.
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“Hey guy, you look like you could use a medic….arggggggghhhh!!!!”
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Maybe that’s their ploy?! They don’t know how to use the rifles, they just carry them around so people will mistake them for soldiers?
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I was thinking more just muscle memory. They trained so long to hold on to those that even in death, they don’t drop their weapons.
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I think you’re giving them too much credit for intelligence. Zombies don’t “ploy”!
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The muscle memory thing works pretty well for me. Of course, depending on which game you’re playing, they might be able to shoot as well!
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Ow! My eyeball!
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Thanks Wudugast. I think they’d mix well with the “armed” Poxwakers for a mix of zombies holding their guns properly and others just sorta clinging to them awkwardly. There’s also Mantic’s Sci-Fi Zombies that mix somewhat with their non-sci-fi ones. I’ll have to have a look at those as well at some stage.
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I never put the SciFi Zombies together, but they are one of the things I regret when I sold off my lump of Mantic stuff on Ebay. I also swore I would never play any mini-tabletop games, and now regret selling off a lot of the Deadzone terrain….which I could have re-purposed for Necromunda.
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Necro-40k terrain was the biggest selling point for me with DeadZone. Would have been nice if the game appealed, but I didn’t really like the whole “squares” thing (and still had my original Necro rules anyway).
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Oh yea, the “squares” in place of measuring. Guess that streamlines things a bit. I actually thought about map grids for Necromunda, as the teen is not very detail-oriented and really disliked having to measure things out in Necro. Think I need more games in, before I decide either way.
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It’s probably fine, but as an old, grumpy gamer I’m so used to measuring from models that it seems odd for a game that touts itself as a miniatures skirmish game – as opposed to something like Zombicide that uses the mechanic, which is a Miniatures Boardgame. Have you played Zombicide, by the way? Well worthwhile, and very accessible to offspring/spouses without being paintful for them or boring for us.
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Haven’t tried Zombicide. Theme-wise, the only time I’ve enjoyed Zombies are a few movies and the Walking Dead comic (not the show!). Sounds like a system worth checking out though.
Yea, if you’re going to appeal to skirmish miniature gamers, that’s not going to work very well. I think that was part of the problem with Dreadball too, they changed some essential characteristics of the Blood Bowl game, to make it ‘play faster’.
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I backed Dreadball as well. Was very keen until I actually received the tiny, misshapen, multipart, restic, blobby, shitty figures. In the end I assembled one model and didn’t manage to get it painted. It was the Ogre(?) star player that was almost large enough to be an Orc.
Zombicide is a good game though – I do recommend it.
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I think I assembled 4 Dreadball teams, I think. The star player Orc was probably one of the better minis of the bunch. His details were not super tiny, so he was easier to paint. I really wish I had know about reading glasses back then, but even still, they were like you said, a pain and misshapen.
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Yeah, all my DeadBall stuff is …somewhere. I’m not entirely sure where, and based on how I feel while typing this, apparently I don’t actually care, either.
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Fantastic work on these and I can easily see them fitting in a Nurgle army. I would have no problem with you using them in an army as they are very fitting.
With the Zomtober painting challenge, I have seen many people post up late or at the end of the month and no one really seems to mind, they’re a friendly bunch after all.
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Thank you Dave. I posted up on his comments, so we’ll see. No biggie either way in the end, but it’s always nice to have some crossover between different “groups” of hobby-bloggers.
The army thing was more because Poxwalkers (aka Plague Zombies) are part of the Nurgle Chaos Space Marine force (Death Guard) rather than the Daemonic force.
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Very nice mate and when I get around to doing some zombies of my own I know exactly where to look for inspiration!
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Just as long as you don’t look here for …..brains!
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Huh, these should work surprisingly well as “Zombie-Cadians” in a pinch — the somewhat goofy weapons are the only telltale element betraying their Warzone origins 😉
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Yeah, one set have standard Dark Legion carbines which look close enough to bolters anyway, while the others are an attempt to take the “native” type of firearm that each of the factional zombies are usually armed with and “goop” them up a bit. One of them is Bauhaus, as noted, one Imperial, one Capitol and the shirtless one is an old-school Cybertronic. While I’ve painted them more or less identical (Bauhaus excepted) to fit in with my IG, I really like the idea of zombies having recognisable origins.
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Looking good! The facial expressions are pretty nice. I also like how you’ve added some ‘Cause of Death’ wounds. Most times you see people just add some random bits of blood, etc. But looks like the guy in the grey got shot threw the head and possibly the chest. I’m guessing those are exit wounds on some of their backs. Uniforms are quite nice too.
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Hey! Where’d my reply that I wrote for this one go? Anyway, I said that credit to the original sculptors for doing a great job and adding in those details in sculpted form. All I needed was to paint them in and then add some BFTBG at the end.
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They look really good. Could you share your technique for Auscam please?
Also, my three entry for unit-ed October are going up tonight after game night.
Cheers,
Pete.
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Will do. I’ll put together a little step by step tute in the next week or so. I think someone asked about it recently as well but I had forgotten totally until I just saw your comment. Looking forward to seeing what you came up with soon!
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Thanks- I look forward to it.
Cheers,
Pete.
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So, more of a Unit-ed Pox-tober group then? Definitely a gruesome bunch! Brilliant!
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Well put there! If I’d thought of that, the post title would have been different!
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Looking good, I used my GW plastic zombies and Catachan fighters to make my own zombie soldiers for playing Necropolis. These chaps would have been a whole lot easier.
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Whatever works mate – I happened to already have these from the WarZone-end clearance sale at my previous FLGS. So all they needed to do was sit around ignored for 20-odd years!
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I like when at least some mobs of zombies are coherent. It’s also cool to see the mixed mobs sometimes, but when it’s only those, it doesn’t feel quite right. There should be outbreaks that hit whole Units of soldiers or cops or hospital personnel or whatever like that and leave more or less uniform mobs. These guys fill that in perfectly.
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An excellent point, Alexis. If I ever get back to my Studio Miniatures plastics, there were a bunch of construction worker types from memory… they also offer a nice “not-Scrubs” range of hospital zombies in metal, wearing scrubs. I think they also have ones in (damaged) Hazmat suits as well..
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Very nice Az-Man! Easily slot into a Nurgle army and unleash hell. The faces are very well done and I like the blood, of course 👍🏽
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Thank you, IRO. I’ve really stalled out on the Nurgle stuff I’d wanted to get done. I think they might have to be on a bit of a three-month plan, though!
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Great work!
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Cheers, mate!
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Love the camo, and zombies with assault rifles, whaaaaat? I agree about the wounds, look great.
Would love also to read about your Auscam technique. Kudos!
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Well, I’m sure that the WarZone background explains it well enough (or as well as it needs for a wargame). I think Alexis nailed it with the muscle memory idea, though.
I’ll do my best to get that Auscam article up in the next couple of …weeks.
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No rush, my November stuff should occupy me!
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Yeah, at this rate the tutorial is realistically likely to go up over the Christmas break…
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Great job Azazel. They all look fabulous!
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Cheers mate! Appreciate the comment!
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Nicely done mate, zombies in spaaaace are just too cool imo, and yours are spot on!
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Thanks Alex. Kinda makes me think I should dig out a bunch of those Mantic ones, but obviously I should do some proper Poxwalkers first….
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